Win95 was viewed as an abomination by the rest of the tech industry at the time. Nostalgia for it was inevitable since it became a lot of people's first computing experience, but it's jarring if you were an adult in tech in 1995. Or simply a Mac user.
I think retrocomputing is an important way to think about an alternate history of personal computing where something other than Unix and Wintel won, and possibly viable alternate futures where we could still change to different paradigms.
SGI made absolutely fantastic workstations, for example.
I was 3D gaming with full video and audio chatter in the mid to late 90's, viewing models in stereo, running powerful applications remotely over X, with the 3D GLX extensions.
Man so many good ideas in the Indigo Magic Desktop!
Package management that included the ability to pause on events such as disk full so a guy could remove other software, or add disk, whatever.
8 bit machines have relevance in embedded spaces.
And it is fun to wonder what would have happened had the Amiga gained traction.
It really was a beautiful time filled with all sorts of great tech people can draw inspiration from today.